Rocket City!

I have been wanting to take my family on a trip to Huntsville AL since we moved out here to Tennessee. It's only 4 hours away and has the NASA Marshall Space center and a great tourist attraction, the US Space and Rocket Center. I like rockets of course, but I also used to work at a NASA facility in a propulsion test center, so I have a special bond with rocket engines. So I finally got my act together, booked us a hotel, and we made a weekend trip to see the rockets. There are of course, some interesting geocaches at and around the rocket center so I made sure to leave some time in our schedule to do some caching.

 The Rocket Center is where we spent most the day, and it was every bit as good as I had hoped. One of the displays, for an Apollo lunar ascent engine (the RS-18), even had a picture from one of the tests I ran out at WSTF, since we hot-fired that engine. I was as happy as can be in that park. The kids enjoyed it too... but I think a lot of the big rocket glamour was lost on them. I can remember visiting the Air and Space museum in Washington DC as a child and being pretty bored, so I tried not to linger too long.

The geocaches did get the kids enthusiasm up though. A couple of the caches nearby were really stellar caches including the one below which is touted as the "most favorited cache in Alabama".

Alabama's most favorited cache, GC15QQ7

Several other caches we found nearby were just LPCs, but the kdis even were excited about those this weekend.

Rocket Trees

One of the cooler caches near the Rocket Center was Ready for Launch, which took you out to a field where all the space camp kids launch their model rockets. The trees across the field were festooned with rockets dangling from their little plastic parachutes, and the kids and I had a fun time running around collecting up the pieces of different rockets and then trying to assemble them into a full rocket. The cache was of course, also a model rocket.